Teaching Assistant: Elaina Rollins, Trinity Class of ’16, email: elainarollins@gmail.com
Part-time long-distance support to help Wesleyan students coordinate their field visits to Hartford, and peer-editing support via Google Docs upon request.

Description: In this seminar, we will investigate an increasingly popular reform movement—choice—to better understand what happens when educators act more like entrepreneurs in competing for students, how families navigate both schooling and housing markets, and the outcomes of recent policy innovations. Drawing from the disciplines of history, sociology, and government, we will compare and contrast choice models that have been promoted by magnet schools, charter schools, and move-to-opportunity housing experiments. Enrollment limited to 19. See WesMaps course listing.

Requirements:Acquire two books in any format:
Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter, A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education (Teachers College Press, 2014).

Douglas S. Massey et al., Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Additional readings will be made available in our Moodle site and on the public web.

For each seminar, students must bring a laptop (Mac, Windows, Chromebook, or Linux) for in-class writing, peer review, and data analysis. Let me know if you need to borrow one.

Students are expected to arrange a one-time visit to Hartford to conduct site visits for one of our research projects. The instructor will assist students with scheduling and coordinating transportation.

Research projects:As a community research seminar, we will conduct small-scale studies to answer questions about school and housing choice in Connecticut, discuss what we learn with local researchers and organizations, and share on the public web.

Project 1: How do school choice programs communicate with families at public events in the Hartford region? We will do basic qualitative research at choice school open house events and fairs, discuss what we are learning with Mira Debs (Yale doctoral candidate in sociology and Wesleyan instructor), and share our findings on the public web.

Project 2: What does public education data reveal—or obscure—about equity and outcomes among Connecticut school choice programs? We will do basic quantitative analysis of publicly-accessible magnet, charter, vo-tech, and Open Choice data. We will discuss what we are learning with Robert Cotto, Jr. (co-author of CT Voices Choice Watch report and Director of Urban Educational Initiatives at Trinity College), and share our findings on the public web.

Project 3: Did Connecticut urban residents who received housing choice counseling move into better neighborhoods, and how is this goal defined? We will do basic quantitative and spatial analysis of housing mobility client data, masked by census block group. We will discuss what we are learning with Erin Boggs (executive director of the Connecticut Open Communities Alliance and Wesleyan alumna), and share our findings on the public web.

Project 4: How do Connecticut urban residents interpret their housing and schooling choices before and after using a digital search tool, and also after receiving personalized guidance? We will modify an open-source digital search tool (http://jackdougherty.github.io/mobility-app and/or http://jackdougherty.github.io/school-search-tool/) and interview people as they use it to explore their options. We will discuss what we are learning with Erin Boggs and housing mobility counselors, and share our findings on the public web.

Frederick M Hess, The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas (Harvard University Press, 2010), excerpt from preface and chapter 1.
See sample online annotations by the instructor.

Terry M. Moe and Paul T. Hill, “Moving to a Mixed Model: Without an Appropriate Role for the Market, the Education Sector Will Stagnate,” in The Futures of School Reform, ed. Jal Mehta, Robert B. Schwartz, and Frederick M. Hess (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2012), 65–93.
Online annotations due Feb 3rd at 10pm by CB, JC, AF

Janelle Scott and Amy Stuart Wells, “A More Perfect Union: Reconciling School Choice Policy with Equality of Opportunity Goals,” in Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance, ed. Prudence L. Carter and Kevin G. Welner (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 123–40.
Online annotations due Feb 3rd at 10pm by IF, AG, SG, HH

In my Education Reform Past & Present course at Trinity, I assigned a video documentary analysis to help students think and write more clearly about this ed reform genre. Read ANY of the sample web essays by students in my previous classes:

Read policy briefs and ask: What do they seek to change? How do they rationalize their views? Where do different views overlap or conflict? Write online annotations by Feb 10th at 10pm on more than one of the seminar’s copies of these public PDFs: ConnCAN – Achieve Hartford – Sheff Movement – Mira Debs (not Moodle) by IF, AF, JC, CB
- see additional comments on GDocs by JC and IF and CB

“Choose Success: A Guide to Public School Choice for Students and their Families,” Connecticut State Department of Education, 2014 website, http://www.sde.ct.gov/sde/cwp/view.asp?a=2681&q=335070 (see Q&A sections on charters, magnets, Open Choice, agri-science, and vo-tech schools).

In-class: Student annotations on recent policy briefs on CT school choice (see links above), and compare with “The State of North End Schools,” video of public event by J. Stan McCauley, January 31, 2014, http://accesstv.org/archives/4178. (Focus on segment from 29:30 to 34:30 on school choice and neighborhood schools).

In-class: Identify proposed school choice legislation in the Bill Record Book, for review by the Education Committee, Connecticut General Assembly, http://www.cga.ct.gov/ed/. Recommended: attend a public hearing in March

Focus on the big questions: What are some of the methodological challenges in evaluating student achievement gains in school choice programs? What is selection bias, and how would you explain it to the general public? How do educational researchers attempt to make use of school choice lotteries to make stronger claims about program effectiveness?

Read: Douglas S. Massey et al., Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Princeton University Press, 2013).
Short response essay due March 30th at 10pm by ___

Presentation on housing mobility outreach and research (DeLuca, HousingMobility.org)

Read: Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter, A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education (Teachers College Press, 2014).
Short response essay due April 14th at 10pm by ___

Panel discussion (7-8pm via video conference or in-person) with Wesleyan alumni working as educators, on how they entered the teaching profession and their personal experiences across different types of public choice schools: